Almaghrib - Literary supplement - Issue 6 - page 83 - May 12, 1938
To-day, the Moslems celebrate in a jubilant mood the birthday commemoration of their great prophet - may the blessing and the safety of God be upon him -. They are devoted to demonstrations of joy, organize festivities to announce the importance of this event and wear new clothes for the circumstance in order to give this holy day a particular glare. All over the world, the Moslems express a great happiness which can be read on their opened out faces. They chase out of their minds the concern of their daily life to accommodate this anniversary with the homages which are as many testimonies of respect towards their supreme saver.
On this occasion, it is true that the Moroccans undoubtedly reserve the most cordial reception to the event, but they are far from thinking of its real significance. One has the feeling they do not realize well the decisive influence which it exerted in the history of mankind. They are satisfied to perpetuate a received tradition by celebrating each year at the same period the prophet's birthday and taking part in the demonstrations which mark the commemoration of such an exceptional historic day.
This anniversary does neither inspire them ideas of splendour nor surround them by an enclosure of virtue, whereas the notions of splendour and virtue are both among the main objectives of the real Islam. Nowadays, the Moroccans are not fully conscious of the true values of their religion. They seem to be unaware of the fact that the teaching to be drawn from this religious feast is not to be sought in the external appearances of an event which one celebrates like any other circumstance. It is to be seen as a reminder of the duty to get inspired by the tradition of wisdom left to all generations to come by a prophet who lit us the way of life in which me must orient our behaviour. It is to be seen as a code of conduct which regulates our facts and acts during our passage in the world where we temporarily live.
Sometimes, we have respected the teachings of this conduct code, and we were at the avant garde of the whole humanity; some other times, we neglected them and we remained far behind the most delayed of the human species. Even though the Moroccans frequent nowadays in large numbers the places of prayer to attend the accounts on the tradition of their prophet which are reported there, one has the feeling they do but follow a simple routine, since they have, at the same time, the spirit worried by various ills they intend to commit when they leave the mosque, ills which will be added to those, very many, already consigned in their sinns' register.
The most sublime and permanent in the conduct of the famous messenger of God, to which we do not pay enough attention, and which we do not take in example, it is this image of the prophet moving, at the very beginning of his contact with the prophecy, towards the idols of Kaaba to destroy them, in order to definitely erase their existence in the people's memory. This symbolic image remained in the history of Islam like an act of permanent stimulation of the Moslems as well as a source of light which guides them in the darkness of their lives.
The prophet destroyed the idols of Kaaba in the name of monotheism. He posed thus the first stone of the building of Islam on the basis of knowledge, morals and brotherhood. His objective was to save the mankind from the polytheist paganism and to show them with the most convincing arguments that the worship of the fetishes not only leads nowhere and benefits nobody, but is the expression of a manifest ignorance and absurd stupidity which must be fought in order to be eradicated. He thus led the human spirit from the world of darkness towards that of the lights. He started seeking the secrets of life and discovered in the letter of the laws which governed them the revealing signs of God's unicity and his eternal and absolute power that one cannot attribute, unless one shows a total ignorance and becomes an object of ridicule, to the idols around Kaaba.
The prophet moved then a new step by working out a constitution which softened manners, developped the virtuous spirit and defined the art of relationships that must be established between the human beings. He also explained why the Moslems are as an edifice in which all the parts overlap one onother, and that their unity is conceivable only in their will to leave their isolation and integrate the community of believers. By granting a particular interest to the common prayer, he sought to create a social life, offering to the inhabitants of the same district the opportunity to better know one another. He prescribed the prayor of friday for the same reason as regards the inhabitants of the same city. He recommended the pilgrimage to the holy places so that the faithful of the whole world can meet one another in a vast islamic gathering. Knowledge, morals and brotherhood constituted the secrecy of the fast propagation of Islam throughout the world and its conquest of the greatest nations at the time of its golden age, conquest without precedent in all the history of humanity. The new era was inaugurated by the Kaaba's idols destruction.
Morocco gives the impression to continue to live to-day as at the anteislamic time. in spite of its being an islamic country. The spirit of each Moroccan sleeps fetishes that we must reduce to naught if we want to reconstitute our force and accelerate the movement of our awakening. Compared to the idols of Kaaba which were real obstacles between the Arabs and the message of the prophet that they did not succeed to understand, which was the main cause of their destruction, three idols of a new type have emerged to-day between the Moroccans and Islam, namely a characterized ignorance, a contemptible moral behaviour and a mortal selfishness. We have to fight these new idols if we do not want to get blinded by our disrespect of the religious principles.
